Overview

Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and tools have become very powerful and are applicable in many domains. In the context of Software Engineering (SE), there are many promising opportunities for the application of NLP to be used to improve SE theory and practice. Recently, investigations have begun to unravel the extent to which large code corpora that can be retrieved from GitHub, StackOverflow, etc., are amenable to analysis using statistical NLP models and algorithms, so that the revolutionary advances in speech recognitions, translation, comprehension, etc. can be applied in SE.

This workshop will bring together an international group of researchers in Statistical NLP, Programming Languages, Software Engineering and related fields for an intensive period of discussion and presentation of results in the area. We invite a range of researchers with both NLP and SE backgrounds to come together, discuss their research, establish datasets, tasks, and baselines, and generally help the field build momentum.

Workshop program

The workshop will be held Sunday, November 13th, co-located with FSE,2016.

Program overview

Sunday, November 13

9:00am –  9:15am

Welcome

9:15am – 10:30am

KeyNote: Conversational Task Completion

Chris Quirk, Microsoft Research

10:30am – 11am

coffee break

11am – 12:30pm

Paper Presentation

Session 1: Coding Style

- Learning to Name Code Identifiers by Miltiadis Allamanis and Charles Sutton.

- On the Use of Statistical Machine Translation for Code Beautification and Refactoring by Bogdan Vasilescu.

Session 2: Tracing & Translating

- Augmenting Natural Language Analysis with Trace Links to Mine Domain Facts from Software Requirements by Jin Guo and Jane Cleland-Huang.

- Natural Language Programming: Turning text into executable code by Reut Tsarfaty.

- Using Natural Language Processing to Translate Software Project Queries into Structured Form by Jane Cleland-Huang, Jin Guo, Natawut Monaikul, Sugandha Lohar, William Goss and Alexander Rasin.

12:30pm – 2:00pm

Lunch

2:00pm – 3:30pm

Technical Briefing: Statistical NLP for Software

Miltiadis Allamanis, Edinburgh University

3:30pm – 4:00pm

coffee break

4:00pm – 5:30pm

Paper Presentation

Session 3: Language Models and Code Cloning

- Entropy Guided Spectrum Based Testing by Matthew Irvine and Baishakhi Ray.

- A deep language model for software code by Hoa Khanh Dam, Truyen Tran and Trang Pham.

- Can I Copy this Code? Extracting Norms from Software Licenses using Frame Semantics by Sayonnha Mandal, Robin Gandhi and Harvey Siy.

Session 4: Search & Retrieval

- Towards Improving Q&A Forum Search and Mining: Automatic Identification of Developer Goal and Symptom by JZachary R. Senzer, Lori Pollock and K. Vijay-Shanker.

- Finding Similar Projects in GitHub using Word2Vec and WMD by Md Masudur Rahman.

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge sponsorship from NSF. A limited amount of Travel funding is available to support participant travel. As per sponsor guidance, priority for travel funding will be given to Natural-language processing researchers and their students, and secondarily to software engineering students and faculty, with special considerations for people from under-represented groups and those without other funding sources.

Call for participation

We invite short position papers, of at most 4 pages in length. Submissions will be reviewed primarily for relevance, will not appear in ACM Digital Library, and may be published subsequently elsewhere. A few of the submissions will be invited for presentation.

Submissions

Please submit your paper here:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nlse2016

Important dates

Aug 8, 2016

1-4 page paper due

Nov 13, 2016

Workshop date

Program Committee

Organizers

• Prem Devanbu (UC Davis)
• Tien N. Nguyen (Iowa State University)
• Baishakhi Ray (University of Virginia)
• Earl Barr (University College, London)
• Christian Bird (Microsoft Research)